flutterbird

...stewards of life..



    ...I was surrounded by a society in which people didn't appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they're descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they'll be reunited with all their dead relatives. Let's not even get into Christianity with its flaming sword guarding the tree of knowledge. Human beings just fundamentally believe crazy fucking shit, the crazier the better...Is believing that human beings are meant to be stewards of life in the universe really crazier than believing a certain brand of car makes you sexy or that God is keeping track of how many times you masturbate?

podbay doors

...why I don't return to Calcutta..


    I go for walks,     I wrote. I look for the man I once was. I believe that by wandering I might find him wandering here. I need to soothe myself in this uncertainty. I want something to write about. Walking in the big decaying yet eternal-seeming ruin of the city helps me meditate on the past and gives me the hope that I might find the man I had once been--confident in a strange country, so anonymous as to be invisible, living the muffled and spectral existence of a traveler, ghosting from street to street in the endless decrepitude, unseen. I expect to come face to face with myself.

  • Current Mood
    contemplative contemplative
odyssey

...books read in 2009..

So I read 57 books in 2009! That’s always been a lucky number for me.

The year of Sputnik and all; somehow I thought I’d get more read in retirement!

I’ll list the books I thought were the best ten I read this year, then the rest. Enjoy!. =)
  • Current Mood
    calm calm
podbay doors

..fairest of them all..


    He had arrived at a sort of     modus vivendi with his grief, and such deals were best not broken. You wore your grief, and if necessary you ate it and you drank it until it became your substance, until you looked in the miror one day and there was nothing looking back but grief itself, a man made entirely of sorrow, but still standing, somehow still alive, surviving.

  • Current Mood
    tired tired
podbay doors

...books read in 2008..

So I read 60 books in 2008! I love my Metro commute! Here are my top ten favorites.

Where I started or read a whole series, I'll list the first of the books I read this year. =)
  • Current Music
    Hot Jazz New Year's Eve
flutterbird

...yes we can..


Fool us twice, shame on us; fool us thrice, just can't be, so let's do it, yes we can.


Barack Obama & Will.I.Am - Yes We Can
  • Current Music
    Yes We Can - Will.I.Am
podbay doors

...courage..


      Nothing is lost; be still; the universe is honest.
      Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,
      But only in its own way, on its own conditions:
      Empires as grains of sand, force as coal,
      Mountains as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say;
      You were never the water, only a wave;
      Not substance, but a form substance assumed.

          - From The Exegesis, by Elder Olson
  • Current Mood
    tired tired
flutterbird

....stranger than fiction..


    Truth usually makes no sense. If your desire is for everything to make perfect sense, then you should take refuge in fiction. In fiction, all threads tie together in a neat bow and everything moves smoothly from one point to the next to the next. In real life, though, in real life...nothing makes sense. Bad things happen to good people. The pious die young while the wicked live until old age. War, famine, pestilence, death all occur randomly and senselessly and leave us more often than not scratching our heads and hurling the question why? into a void that provides no answers.

    So if everything in your life makes perfect sense, then make no sudden moves and do not allow anyone to pinch you, for you are likely dreaming and you would not want to spoil it.

  • Current Music
    The Rip - Portishead